VisionArt

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VisionArt Design & Animation was a motion picture and television visual effects company, founded in the 1980s by David Rose and Todd Hess. Though originally a small Orange County company working primarily on cable TV adds and flying logos, VisionArt moved to Santa Monica in 1992, winning its first major effects work with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The studio originated in Santa Ana, California, later moved to Santa Monica, California, and is closed its doors in 2000. (VisionArt is often incorrectly cited as Vision Arts.)

Dennis Blakey, who headed the initial development and effects work for the shape-shifting character Odo, brought VisionArt its first prime-time Emmy award. Blakey and Dorene Haver later created the first CGI ship for Star Trek in the form of a 3D runabout shuttle for Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Other early work included the pilot of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman for which Rob Bredow, Ted Fay, Carl Hooper, Daniel Kramer and Pete Shinners created the first instance of seamlessly morphing between a human actor and a photorealistic CGI model of the actor. Ted Fay also created the first photorealistic talking dog for Northern Exposure, a technology that was further advanced for the film version of Dr. Dolittle.

VisionArt's claim to fame on the big screen was arguably its creation of the majority of the dogfight sequences for Independence Day, which won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. Sparky, a dynamics/simulation software spearheaded by Rob Bredow, allowed for near-real-time animation of large groups of F-18 jet fighters, alien attackers, missiles, smoke trailers, shields, etc. Sparky was also able to render the frames in hardware anti-aliased at film resolution at just one minute per frame, allowing the delivery of two shots per day. Prior shots had taken about one month each.

VisionArt's sister company, FutureLight, headed by Rob Bredow, created the first real-time optical motion capture (mocap) system in the industry. While a large amount of mocap data was created to animate the hero CG character for 1998's Godzilla, ultimately the decision was made to animate the Godzilla character through traditional means, so as to keep continuity with shots being done by Centropolis Effects, owned by the film's director Roland Emmerich. Mocap, however, was used in conjunction with Sparky for a number of key "Babyzilla" shots.

In addition to being known for sci-fi work like Independence Day, Star Trek, and Godzilla, VisionArt specialized in "transparent" effects: removing, replacing, or modifying a wide range of objects in a scene to either help tell the story, fix a mistake, or recreate worlds that no longer exist, or never did.

VisionArt also won the Emmy for Best Individual Achievement in Visual Effects for Star Trek: Voyager.

VisionArt closed their doors in 2000, selling most of its assets to Digital Art Media. Many of its key staff are now at Sony Pictures Imageworks, Digital Domain, and other VFX facilities.

[edit] VisionArt Selected Filmography

[edit] External links and sources

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